We’re a little less than halfway through our trip, so I thought this might be a good time for a status update. Here’s a few random thoughts of our trip this far:
Amanda’s first surprise went off without a hitch. On the plane down, Amanda and I listened to the finale show of All About The Mouse, in which Jonathan read my email and thus revealed to Amanda that we weren’t staying off site – we’re staying at Disney’s Pop Century resort. She was completely shocked. Awesome.
It is hot as Hades. Ugh. I haven’t stopped sweating since we got off the plane. Double Ugh.
Amanda got a Magical Moment on her very first day. We were at Epcot’s guest services getting our tickets upgraded. She asked me if we could/should get FastPasses for Test Track next. I said we couldn’t because we currently had FPs for Soarin’. The CM doing our upgrades heard this, saw Amanda’s first timer button, and decided to give her a gift – a FP for two for any attraction of her choosing, for immediate use. Very cool.
Amanda was blown away by IllumiNations. As she should have been, of course. 🙂
I understand why some folks who grew up watching the Main St Electrical parade in Disney World love it, for nostalgic reasons. But in my opinion, Spectromagic is better.
Similarly, while the new Nighttastic fireworks are cool, I prefer Wishes.
We redeemed my Volunteer certificate from the “Give a Day, Get a Disney Day” promotion for a golden fastpass. It allowed entrance to 6 attractions’ FP queues, for immediate use (once each). We did Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain, and Buzz twice each yesterday, and Splash Mountain three times. Our longest wait of the day was about 20 minutes, for Peter Pan. We saw wait times of up to 150 minutes on Space Mountain!
Trail’s End buffet at Fort Wilderness is a pretty nice buffet. Small, relaxed, simple, but good food.
Brazilian tourgroups are EVERYWHERE.
Islands of Adventure was interesting. I have mixed feelings about a lot of it. Many of the attractions have very well themed queues, but lead to rides themselves which have none. The employees seem fairly rude, more than once I heard them yelling at guests to move along and get up and such. The Jurassic Park ride is 3 minutes of boredom followed by 9 seconds of excitement. The Harry Potter land is NOT built to hold the crowds it’s experiencing right now.
On the plus side, the Harry Potter attraction itself is pretty phenomenal. I’d go so far as to say it may be better than anything Disney has. Great theming, good storyline, innovative technology. Two thumbs way up.
That’s it for now. I’ll try to post pics later this week of maybe when we get back.